11 ms·
What clearly seems wrong is the requirement to fill out forms on the race and gender of people you interview, and to have quotas to control whose voice is hear
by epivosism 5y ago
What clearly seems wrong is the requirement to fill out forms on the race and gender of people you interview, and to have quotas to control whose voice is heard based on those irrelevant traits (irrelevant relative to the individual person's life, ideas, experiences, ability to express themselves etc.)
My policy is to refuse to give my gender or race. If everybody did this, high frequencies of "other" or "unknown" could be spun any way they want to people looking at statistics. If they aren't satisfied with this, they have to go on record clarifying exactly how they define race - which seems difficult since they're also the people who claim it's not a real concept.
- cuspycode 5y agoObligatory story beginning in 1963, where computer scientist Les Earnest explains why he always entered "mongrel" when questioned about his race: http://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/les/mongrel.htm http://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/les/mongrel.htm
- epivosism 5y agoThis is pretty good, thanks. TLDR: institutional adventures from a national security employee challenging the requirement to declare their race. This reminds me of "Seeing like a State" by James C Scott: attempts to simplify the world to allow generalizations about it always lose valuable detail.
- pyuser583 5y agoLol … I like the part about the Caucuses being in the USSR, so being Caucasian meant being Soviet. I once told a friend from west India to put “Aryan” down for race, but then stopped him and apologized after I realized that was mean-funny, not funny-funny. I was really an asshole in my 20s.
- jimmygrapes 5y agoKinda unrelated but Les is one of my favorite people to use as an example of how "websites" used to be. His writing is fun and honest, and some of his ideas were imo groundbreaking (and many are floating about waiting to be rediscovered).
- newsclues 5y agoI never fill out the preferred pronoun section that have suddenly made their way into forms.
- Spooky23 5y agoI have a coworker who assigned “Lord” as his personal pronoun.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Lio 5y agoI always liked the idea of using “m’lud” or “y’excellency”. It makes HR emails sound more subservient I think. HR departments are famed for their sense of humour so I’m sure they’d be fine with it.
- mikepurvis 5y agoIsn't preferred pronouns kind of orthogonal to the rest of the stuff? It has nothing to do with attempting to ensure representation and is instead about addressing a person in the manner of their choosing, akin to asking a woman if she prefers Ms, Miss, Mme, Mrs, etc. I expect it's probably way more appropriate in most contexts to directly ask a person what their preferred pronouns are than to ask what their gender identity is; the pronouns are what you actually need and this way you're finding them out with certainty rather than trying to guess based on some internal gender->pronoun mapping table.
- coolso 5y agoPronouns are merely virtue signaling acts of control. By specifying pronouns if they are obvious (99% of the time) you are signaling you are part of a non-bigoted, non-hateful club. Surely you don’t hate people right? So why don’t you have your pronouns visible, fellow citizen? It’s also a form of control in redefining the obvious. You want to just live your life? Nope, sorry, you need to consciously be aware of my preferred pronouns at all times. It’s a very narcissistic and attention seeking thing too.
- beebmam 5y agoI'm a strict egalitarian and have been doing exactly this, and always encourage others to do exactly this. I refuse to state my gender, race, class, health status, sexuality, or any other qualifier that could categorize me into being discriminated against or in favor of. Let my actions speak to the quality of my character. edit: Not sure why this thread has gone deep into a discussion about pronouns. I don't identify as any gender and welcome any pronouns to refer to me. My humanity is the only classifier I accept. Think of my pronouns as a `void *`
- NikolaeVarius 5y agoAt a previous job HR directly contacted me and told me to put my pronouns on my profile. I said sure and proceeded to ignore it. Fuck that shit
- coolso 5y agoGood. This pronoun virtue signaling meme has gotta go. Or at least don’t censor us by limiting us to the ones Officially Approved by the Pronoun Establishment like Instagram and most other places do. If they can have custom pronouns, why can’t we? (The answer is because it would immediately undermine the “cause” by shedding light on just how silly but also how 1984-esque the concept is.)
- colechristensen 5y agoIf someone wants to tell me pronouns they want to be referred to, sure, I’ll try to remember as long as they’re not asking for something extreme, but honestly I’m not that good with even names so… best effort. I would rather not give out pronouns and don’t really care how people refer to me though “they” in forums when my username is my real name does come off as a bit strange… though again, this is a trivial annoyance.
- metabagel 5y agoYes, it's a trivial annoyance. That's the human, normal way of looking at this, not like it's some massive festering grievance as some people seem to feel.
- jfk13 5y agoIf asked for race, I suggest answering "human".
- speedgoose 5y agoIt's not often, the last time for me was the stackoverflow survey. I usually reply that it's an illegal question where I live.
- hk__2 5y ago> I usually reply that it's an illegal question where I live. It’s not. Questions about race or origin are allowed in France with some conditions; it’s a common misconception that they are prohibited. For example, it’s fine to ask which race you feel you belong to, or any similar subjective question [1, p.70]. [1]: https://www.cnil.fr/sites/default/files/atoms/files/ddd_gui_20120501_egalite_chances_0.pdf https://www.cnil.fr/sites/default/files/atoms/files/ddd_gui_...
- kennywinker 5y agoI mean it sounds bad, right? But if all the people they talk to for stories are white - and they’re attempting to fix that, and track their progress in fixing that - how exactly should they go about doing that?
- hammock 5y agoIs the issue that all the people they talk to for stories is white? Or is that a symptom of the real issue, which is something else? And if it is something else, is there a better thing to track?
- ketzo 5y agoEven if it is a symptom – say they're interviewing CEOs for a piece on Canadian business, so it's tricky to find people who are not white men – then I would argue that what they're doing is important. There's a chicken and egg thing, and media can be a part of addressing the root cause. To me it seems logical that a young black woman who sees a black female CEO interviewed on TV is more likely to become a CEO herself.
- inglor_cz 5y ago"To me it seems logical that a young black woman who sees a black female CEO interviewed on TV is more likely to become a CEO herself. " Beware logic in this case. A lot of claims in social sciences seem logical, but either aren't proven at all or the alleged proof fails to replicate. A similar logic was used to argue for banning violent video games or porn.
- hk__2 5y agoThis is a strawman argument. That some claims aren’t proven or that some similar logic was used to do another bad thing doesn’t mean OP is wrong. What OP is referring to is largely documented and is not some small claim from a random article.
- phonypc 5y ago>which seems difficult since they're also the people who claim it's not a real concept. A straw man if there ever was one. Insofar as anyone even says something like "race isn't real", the claim isn't that the concept doesn't exist. What would that even mean? The claim is that it isn't biologically grounded, or that it's socially constructed or some such.
- colechristensen 5y agoI don’t really see that as a straw man, there is significant cognitive dissonance where the same movement seems to be both for and against putting things into categories like “race”. Like we should all be blind to this artificial construct but also classify everybody and every thing with it and all “stay in our racial lanes”. Observe and it seems to be a real phenomenon and not just an invented opponent.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- redisman 5y agoI mean they’ll just visually gauge what you are in that case. Interviewing is in no way objective
- SavantIdiot 5y ago> they have to go on record clarifying exactly how they define race - In these contexts, "race" is a stand-in for social segregation phenomena and not the Oxford dictionary defintion. By not identifying the distribution of various discriminated-against groups, they are rendered invisible, or nonexistant when it comes to policy making. THis is fine if you are in the majority, because that is the de facto policy making consideration, but not so good if you are not represented. Dismissing this as "spinning statistics" is a very privileged viewpoint, because it means you aren't affected by the statistics so why should you care?
- inglor_cz 5y agoAll racial classification schemes in the Western world are running against the wind of interracial marriage. Mixed kids of the "25 per cent Lithuanian, 25 per cent Arab, 25 per cent Mexican and 25 per cent Japanese" type are becoming ever more common and the narrow racial classification into old fashioned racial boxes is unable to categorize them with any kind of precision. In that case, either you revert to the "one drop rule" of the Old South and start classifying anyone with any non-white ancestor as a minority, or run into untenable contradictions.
- SavantIdiot 5y agoThat's one way to look at it, if you want to radically oversimplify the problem. Another way to look at it is there currently exists very clear discrimination practices based other vectors (income, geography, history). System racism is intersectional. Arguing that it is "all or nothing" is another tactic to erase the existence of discrimination. This fallacy is often deployed intentionally.
- inglor_cz 5y agoOf the things you mentioned, income and geography is actually much easier to classify objectively than history and race. As an added bonus, income-based social policies would not throw poor people with certain ethnic backgrounds onto the "won't help, are privileged" pile. Poverty is crushing for everyone.
- donohoe 5y agoYes, but there is a reason. Typically all the race and gender of people being interviews was usually "white" and "male" to the exclusion of other voices with a different perspective. The push to equality (and we are not there yet) requires change and that change can be ignored unless you track it.
- hk__2 5y ago> irrelevant relative to the individual person's life, ideas, experiences, ability to express themselves etc. I’m not sure I get you here. Of course race and gender have a huge impact on a person’s life, and thus on their ideas, experiences and ability to express themselves. White men virtually never experience racism or sexism, whereas women and/or Black people are reminded about their identity every day. All women have been bothered by men in the street and all Black people have heard numerous racist comments through their life. They are so used to it they don’t even talk about it; it’s just normal. White men can’t even imagine to what extend this goes because they never experience it. People who never experience discriminations often don’t see the problem or diminish it because it’s unfamiliar to them.
- epivosism 5y agoSome of your "nevers" are a bit too strong. While a majority where I was born, I spent 10+ years as a minority relative to my surroundings and definitely got different treatment, in some cases in a disagreeable way and sometimes favorably. The world is more complex than just blacks & whites in the USA - there's cantonese/mandarin speaker discrimination, caste discrimination, fluent vs accented mandarin speaking ability, being from the wrong side of the tracks/from the wrong neighborhood or social class discrimination independent of race. Heck, black and white cops like each other and hate firemen of all races with a passion; Non-muslims have paid Jizya in Muslim countries. So I agree that minimizing discrimination shouldn't be done, but I disagree that this is something the racial or gender majority never experiences. I agree it is wrong to live in your own privilege and unfairly judge other people, but I think experience of both sides of the experience are more universal than you suggest. In fact I think we should emphasize the extent of the problem on all axes, as a way to make people come to the moral realization that they should judge people as individuals and not by any other group trait - because they should remember how wrong it was when someone did it to them.
- akomtu 5y agoWho are those "white men"? Jews, italians, chinese? Where's the whiteness line drawn?
- 5y ago